Urban Education: Two Years After His Sister Graduated HS As Valedictorian With A 4.91 GPA, He Did The Same With A 4.93
I guess you can call this an overload of academically gifted kids for a household. One proud mum is celebrating again like she did two years ago when her daughter, Chyna Mays, graduated at the top of her class with a 4.91 GPA and college acceptance letters to schools like Brown, Stanford, Columbia, Rice, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania among others flooded her way. Like déjà vu, fast forward two years after her daughter’s achievement, her son, Anthony Mays II has followed the same path. He just graduated as the valedictorian with a 4.93 GPA from Rockdale Magnet School for Science and Technology where his sister set the standard.
According to Because of Them, their mother, Demeka Breedlove-Mays, said;
“Our secret is that we had a plan for them since birth and followed it. Admittedly, the Ivy league or top 5 schools were not a part of the initial plan. We just wanted them to attend great schools on full rides. One day, my daughter came home from elementary school after attending a college fair and declared she wanted to go to Yale. That’s when we had to seriously do research about admission requirements and costs. We told her what it would take and what she needed to do to work for it. We took them both on college tours as early as 8th grade. During a West Coast tour my son put Stanford at the top of his list. After an east coast tour, he added MIT and Harvard.”
The plan which included enrichment and readiness plans and programs that continued through summer breaks, worked. Anthony was not only accepted into MIT and Harvard, he also received favorable responses from Stanford, Brown, The University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and Dartmouth amongst others.
“Their father and I met and graduated from an HBCU – FAMU. We were both first-generation college students and graduates. We were the first in our families to graduate high school and go to college. We encouraged and helped our younger siblings to apply and go to college. We made education a priority in our family because we were determined that our generation would change our families’ histories. We wanted our children to make quantum leaps in education and in life to further advance the trajectory of our family.”
It’s understood both Chyna and Anthony earned all A’s on every report card from Kindergarten through 12th grade. This also includes their advanced placement courses. In high school, Anthony took 18 AP courses opting for a non-AP course only if the course was an elective or an AP course wasn’t available. His 4.93 GPA also made him the only male and the only Black valedictorian for the Class of 2019 in the entire Rockdale County Public School District.
He will join his sister at Stanford in the fall and plans to major in Management Science-Engineering (economics-finance track) and Mathematics with Mandarin as his language of study. As for Chyna, she’s a rising junior studying Bioengineering and just received her 2nd academic excellence award for maintaining a 3.5GPA or higher all year.
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